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tom brokaw "anchor man anchor man." tonight i'll ask him about this generation of the end of the war. >> we're ending the war with a final march towards home. this is an extra ordinary achievement. >> this is politics. >> the protests at home and around the world. and his new book, the time of our lives, what he thinks america needs now. >> this is what we can learn from our time. >> top of the hour, this is "piers morgan tonight." tom broe ka's one of my journalistic heroes. he says exactly the saying, the nbc anchor of nbc news for 22 years announcing his retirement in the wake of 9/11. he's now an author "the time of our lives." tom, welcome. >> piers, it's really good to be here. and that business about me being your hero, you're going to get over that by the end of the hour, i promise. >> i doubt that very much. you're actually the perfect guy to ask this question. i your book with great fascination and also with an eye how this year, 2011, is going to rate in the news because to me, who is a new boy to this news anchoring game, it seems like it's been the most incredible year for news that i can remember but what do you think? >> well, it's been a chaotic year. part of the reason that we see it in the way that we do is that it never stops coming at us because of the new instrumentation. it's not just on cable television or broadcast television or talk radio. it's now all over the internet and all over the social media at all times. so there's really no escaping it. in the old days when there would be big events, you have a little more of a pace, i guess you would describe it. you hear something in the morning, spend the day at work, come home in the evening, and then take it in again and then maybe read the morning paper the next day. now it goes on all day long. you can't escape it even at work. if you go online, you're likely to get some kind of a news site that will pop up, people will be talking about it. having said that, however, this is one of the most fractious political years that i can remember. but i have been reading about the campaign of 1948, in which harry truman was trying to be re-elected on his own terms running against tom dewey. he had third-party candidates, people in the south not happy with him and some of the rhetoric is very similar to what we're hearing today. >> "time" magazine announced its person of the year and they went for a generic, the protester. what did you think of that choice? >> i thought it was a good call. there is a lot of anxiety and unhappiness out there. by the way, i think one of the important developments in the protest movement sometimes gets overlooked and that's the tea party. the tea party began as a protest movement and as i've said on several occasions and i'm determined to repeat here tonight, the tea party played by the rules. they got angry, got to message, and stayed on message and they may not be what you think of is the best interest of the country but they are driving the debate on the republican side now more than any other component of the republican party. and that's because they are determined to remain disciplined and faithful to what they believe in. i think it's an object lesson for other groups who want to get organized or other groups not happy with the current condition of the political debate in this country. take a pace from the tea party and rally around what you believe in. >> do you see, tom, any kind of synergy between occupy wall treat, the arab spring uprisings? is there a common thread there? >> first of all, occupy wall street is not calling for the overthrow of their government and however many flaws that we have here, we still have a representative government. the problem with occupy wall street at the moment is that they don't seem to have a well-defined core. i've been at the rallies downtown in new york and on wall street and a very small presence and in los angeles, slightly larger but, again, it didn't have the kind of an electricity that you would expect from that kind of a movement. certainly they've landed on something that i think resonates with a lot of people and that's the 1% versus 99%. most people, the overwhelming majority, obviously, are on the 99% and there is that great concern about income and equality in this country. in the last three weeks i have been all over america. 19 cities altogether, and i've had a lot of high-income people come to me who say, we really have to do something about income and equality and that could cause a class war far and the consequences are not fun to contemplate. >> the nature, i guess, of the american dreams, certainly when you grew up and born in 1940, you're a war child in that sense. coming out of the great depression, post-war america i think in some ways capitalized perhaps on all that happened there, became a stronger country and a great sense of national unity and purpose to it and became the great manufacturing force. it's a very different crisis america faces right now because it's almost a crisis of, what is the american dream now? what is the identity? what kind of future are young americans going to be facing? >> well, first of all, i was a member of the luckiest generation as my contemporaries and we've all agreed that we were the ones who caught the best wave. after the war, our parents who had gone through all of the trials of the depression and world war ii, then came home to unprecedented working class prosperity and the united states was a kol las sas in the world. europe had been destroyed, japan had been destroyed, china was one of those blank spots on the map that might as well have said beyond here serpents lie. we didn't know what was going on there. so we were able to have the great industrial economy that enriched the middle class and gave it the foundation that we would like to recapture today. i think what has happened since then is that we're playing too much by the old rules and not enough by the real rules. we did learn our manufacturing and 40% of the gdp is made up of financial services. they don't make anything. they trade money. it's not a dishonorable profession but not in the interest of a broad sweep of america to have so much concentration in financial services without having high-tech manufacturing, without having job opportunities that used to exist when you had smaller farms, now it's big agri business and more harvesting procedures and so we have reduced our job foundation in this country to a perilous point and we need to think carefully how we get out of that. >> i want to play a clip for a speech by president obama in kansas which actually touches on that point. let's watch this. >> my grandparents served during world war ii. he was a soldier in patton's army. she was a worker on a bomber assembly line. they believed in america where hard work paid off. and responsibility was rewarded and anyone could make it if they tried no matter who you were, no matter where you came from, no matter how you started out. >> there's a problem, tom, with what the president was saying there, that that basic tenant of what the american dream stood for, that anybody could make it. does that really exist anymore? i mean, a lot of people, i guess, are gifted and talented but are simply not able to realize their dream, their talent, under this current financial climate. >> well, i think with all due respect to the president, i think that was even true then. everyone could get a job but what he managed to overlook at that point was that, by the way, his grandparents that he was talking about were white people from kansas in the american south. they weren't getting very good jobs during that time of the post-war. those who were left in the south lived below the poverty line for a long time and not just african-american people. a lot of poor white people did as well and i think one of the lessons of the recent downturn is that we have to build proportion back into our lives as well and build expectations back into our lives. that does not mean that we ought not have a job that pays a living wage. as i go across america, i find entrepreneurial people and high-tech manufacturers complain to me that they can't find workers with the skill set that they need. we need to work harder on education. the community colleges now are our growth industry because they are teaching young people how to weld, how to use computers in the workplace, how to reason, not just put a widget on a passing assembly line of some kind. these are big tasks and we ought not to underestimate how hard the job ahead of us is and it's going to require all of us -- we've always been at our best, piers, in this country. this is an immigrant country and we've always been the best of our counterparts. we need to get back to that again. >> do you think the average american, based on the spending that we saw over the thanksgiving holiday, for example, which i found really quite alarming, because i couldn't imagine your generation post pwar facing that kind of financial restraint, just ignoring reality and going on this spending spree. >> well, we were kind of a transition our parents had a very large thrift gene and that was based on their experiences in the depression and then later in the war. my generation got a little giddy about how much money we were able to earn, how well we could live and how we could spend it. now at this stage in our lives, we're looking back, we're losing our parents and we're realizing the soundness of those values. and thin you have succeeding generations who got credit cards and debt was not something that you worried about. it was just a reality of life. we got to a point in which you ever a negative savings rate. i find that hard to and like you i'm paid very well for what i do and i'm able to keep myself comfortable and my kids who are hardworking and have that thrift gene passed down from their grand parents but at the same time, their needs if they really get critical, they've got dad around to help out. they like to established on their own and they think about it. but in much of the country there was this determination to have as many toys as you possibly could. one of my friends, who is a very successful businessman says, we have to change in this country. we have to wake up in the morning and determine what we need. not just what we want. >> very good point. let's take a little break, tom. when we come back, i want to talk about the republican nomination battle which is getting rather bruising, rather ugly, and rather personal, as it always seems to. venture card we get double miles on every purchase. so we earned a holiday trip to the big apple twice as fast! dinner! 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[ male announcer ] head & shoulders: seven benefits, every bottle. the health poll teas, energy policies, which of those will be your highest priority your first year in office and which will follow in sequence, senator mccain? >> that's tom brokaw moderating the nbc presidential debate just a month before the 2008 election. tom is back with me now. tom, you've been in that moderating position a few times. what do you make of the way that the republican race is going, the debates, in particular? >> well, frankly, i'm a big advocate of as many debates as we can because you find out about candidates during that time. i like to remind people that four years ago, for all the excitement now generated by the shifting polls, that four years ago rudy giuliani was leading and fred thompson was a very strong number two. rudy giuliani is now giving speeches for money and fred thompson is doing commercials for mortgages on television. i don't know what's going do happen in the next month or so. it's important for all of us, journalists, especially, not a vote has been cast so far and very often these polls are a snapshot of a given time. now when people have to go into that booth and determine who they want as their candidate and envision who they want in the oval office, the dna changes as people make decisions. >> it's interesting that you look at the poll numbers for somebody like jon huntsman, for example, which remain very, very low. if you talk to most intelligent people in washington or in the media, they are all surprised by this. is it unfeasible that someone like him could actually come from a very low base and still win the nomination? >> well, i think he has some hopes that he can do that. he is a man with a very impressive resume. he was a strong and successful governor of a conservative state, utah. he has a strong conservative record but in the republican primaries s. he seems not to fit the groups that are really defining that selection process at this time. you know, he hopes that he will do well in new hampshire and stay alive and then downstream he will have some success and my own guess is that he probably is beginning to hope that if it become as broker convention, he can have a voice in that. but it's tough now just looking at the playing field how -- to see how jon huntsman, as impressive as his credentials are, can catapult to the top. he takes position not in line with many of the people who are driving the republican debate on climate change, for example. he believes its real and he believes it's true and there are a lot of people who have contrary points of view. >> what is clear is that although newt gingrich, who's the current front-runner, would prefer this to be a very civilized affair, mitt romney took off the gloves and called gingrich zany, suggested that he's ill suited temper meantally to. >> newt gingrich has been a lot of things to a lot of people over the years and whatever you think of him, he's a tenacious and very nibble politician. there are very few people who follow this closely who thought that what happened last summer when all of his key campaign workers walked out on him and next thing you know we're talking about half a million dollars in tiffany bills that he had run up but he's republican side on the debates, he knows how to speak directly to that base because he helped invent it, in fact. but, again, it's worth remembering now a vote has been cast and what you're seeing now from romney is that a lot of members of what you would call the traditional republican establishment have are gone to him and said, you've got to get a lot tougher against this guy because he's in danger of just rolling over the top of you. that's how politics is played in this country and we're about to see it play out, first in iowa and then in new hampshire and then in south carolina and in florida. the calendar works pretty well for newt gingrich. if he can do well in iowa and at least be in the hunt in new hampshire, then go south to south carolina and then go to florida, who knows. >> i mean, what you could have, judging by the polls at the moment, you could have ron paul winning in iowa, romney winning in new hampshire and gingrich winning in south carolina or florida. >> yes, he could. and then there's a certain amount of momentum that takes hold. it depends on the organization, how much money he's able to attract, whether the rest of the republican party represent ared by his opponents will rally behind him or whether they will go to someone else and try to encourage them to get into the race. where newt gingrich has a problem, and this showed up in the poll next week, is downstream. say he gets the nomination. then all of the indications are that he would have a hard time winning in the general election. you can see it right there. mitt romney does much better against barack obama than newt gingrich does. gingrich loses to obama right now by 11 points, it's a margin of error between barack obama and mitt romney and a lot of republicans are looking at those numbers and saying, look, i admire how well he's doing but it's not the best interest of the party for the long run. >> you've been quite scared thinking about donald trump and his planned debate which has obviously now been scrapped. what did you have against that? >> listen, i didn't have any -- i've known donald trump for a long time. he's part and parcel of the city of new york and he's been one of those larger than life figures. he's a shameless life promoter. i had a note from him today with that underlined saying, thanks for the nice words. my problem with it was -- and i'm sorry, piers, but i thought he got way too much attention for saying that he's going to moderate a debate in iowa. it should have been one line. but he was here, he was all over the cable networks because he is donald trump. i think that is a little too easy. we ought to be working harder at covering the tough issues that are out there. what are we going to do about housing in this country, 20 million homes in peril or in foreclosure or under some stressful conditions and the families in those homes? what are we going to do about the jobless american. we've got systematic issues that we need to deal with rather than whether donald trump is going to run a debate or not and it turned out to be a moot point because most of the candidates didn't want to show up. he's been doing this for a long, long time. god bless him. he's protected by the first amendment just like the rest of us. >> well, he can come on this show and debate with me any time. let's take another break, tom. when i come back, i want to talk to you about barack obama. whether he's been, in your expert opinion, more of a success than a failure as president so far. 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[ female announcer ] phillips' colon health. including the important pivotal state of florida, now we have awarded that to vice president al gore. nbc news is now taking florida out of vice president gore's column. >> from the network's point of vie, for the wrong reasons at the beginning when we moved it over to the al gore column and then at the end when it moved back to george w. bush's column and it took him up over the top. >> that is tom brokaw. coverage in the year 2000. that was a terrible moment for d disciples like me. >> it was the longest political night of my career. i would like to think that i wasn't alone in making a mistake. there were a lot of bad calls that night. but i'd like to say that when we first called florida for al gore, i got a call instantly from the bush white house down in texas and from karl rove who went on the air and said, that's not what we're hearing down there and i have a high regard for karl rove's ability to count votes and lay the ground on aelects day going into that night and i turned to tim russert, my late and beloved colleague and said, we have a problem here,